Synchronized collaborative design with heterogeneous CAD systems based on macro semantic commands

This paper proposes a macro semantic commands based approach to support synchronized collaborative design upon heterogeneous CAD systems. By analyzing the modeling commands and macro files of several commercial CAD systems, the definitions of macro command group (MCG) and macro semantic command (MSC) are given and a set of MSCs are developed. In this approach, the MCGs corresponding to the modeling operations of each CAD systems are exchanged by MSC in the form of XML to real-time transfer parametric information including design intent between heterogeneous CAD systems. The preliminary test results show the proposed approach is promising.